OOC: Set shortly after Viper's death during phase 4 of the Halloween event

Aliana breathed a heavy sigh while she stared down at the blood and ooze covered corpse of Viper laid out across a table in her study. Seeing the tricolored woman lying still, eyes closed and jaws hung partially open in an eternally frozen fresco of death didn't feel real. It felt more like a bad dream; like she was drifting about in a daze. First her pups, now Viper... How many lives would this plague steal away? Though she had never once had a positive interaction with the savage of a wolf, Ali couldn't help but feel a twinge of sadness in her heart. Just because they hadn't gotten along didn't mean she'd ever wish ill on the poor woman. What a terrible way to die... she thought to herself while she studied the body. Chimera had filled her in on the more graphic details of Viper's demise so she knew what she was getting into, but Ali had insisted on doing the autopsy. She had to know what had happened to Viper, and more importantly, know what they were up against so they could best treat the sick children.

Pursing her lips, Aliana stepped away from the table and moved to gather up her tools, laying them out methodically and neatly in a row on the table near the corpse. She'd found many of them in one of the old buildings here, denoted with a red cross, along with an assortment of other valuable medical supplies and instruments. Around her nose and mouth, Aliana had wrapped a piece of cloth she'd scavenged from one of the old wardrobes in a sort of makeshift mask. She didn't know how infectious this disease was and she wasn't about to take any chances. "Okay... here we go." Taking a few deep breaths to psyche herself up, Ali grabbed a scalpel in her teeth from beneath her mask and began to make the first incisions on the corpse's torso, officially kicking off her first ever autopsy.

"Aliana"

Dalila followed the path to Aliana's study, carefully poking her head past the door frame to peek inside. She had come to check on Aliana with everything that was going on and had happened, worried about her friend and wondering if there was anything she could do to help. What she found though was Aliana standing by Viper's body that was laid out on a table, a smaller table beside it with various tools and instruments on it. Word had gotten around among their little group that Aliana was planning on doing this autopsy, but Dalila hadn't realized that it would be today. Her ears flicked and she stood by watching for a moment as Aliana made the first cuts and she wondered for a moment whether she should go, but a combination of morbid curiosity and feeling as if she should help Aliana do this kept her there. She came forward, keeping a little bit of distance, but standing where Aliana could see her and she could get a better view of what Ali was doing. "Anything I can do to help? Do you need anything?"

"Dalila"

Not long after Aliana had made the first incisions down Viper's torso, the soft sound of claws on the hardwood floor made her ears flick back and her head shoot up I the direction of the door. She saw Dalila approach, keeping her distance, but also watching with grim curiosity. The mottled woman asked if she could help and Ali glanced between her and the body for a moment. "I think I've got it, but I wouldn't mind the company. It might be less... morbid if I'm not alone," she said, words slightly muffled from the scalpel between her teeth. "Grab a mask. I don't know if she's contagious." She, not it. She was still Viper, not just some cadaver. Even if the woman had hated her in life, Aliana would treat her remains with respect. Once Dalila had donned the proper safety equipment and joined her, Ali took another deep breath and leaned in to finish making her cuts down and across the torso, making four diagonal lines to Viper's hips and shoulders respectively. "These cuts along the length of the torso and to the joints allow us to open the body cleanly," she explained to her companion, finding a bit of comfort in pretending this was a medical lesson than her carving open her former pack mate. "Now we can take a look inside and see what happened to Viper. Hopefully, it'll teach us something helpful..." Then she began to peel away the cooled flesh and muscle with careful paws.

The inside of Viper smelled terrible. All corpses stunk, sure, but there was an odd, earthy smell to the wolf's remains. Aliana didn't realize what it was until she pulled back the skin and flesh from Viper's chest and recoiled in disgust. The tricolored fae's lungs were almost entirely covered in fungi, mushrooms matching the ones that had appeared all across the world outside. They grew like tumors from the organ, sticking to her ribs in some places where they'd fused between meat and bone. It was truly a revolting sight, and it looked like the fungi had already been eating away at her body before she was even dead, killing her slowly. The same viscous glowing ooze that had been dribbling from her mouth seeped from her lungs, which looked bloated and unnaturally large, pressing into her ribcage in a grotesque manner. Ali swallowed back her gag reflex, steeling herself as she brought the blade of the scalpel down towards the mushroom-encrusted lungs.

The moment the scalpel punctured Viper's left lung, a burst of fluorescent spores erupted out along with a deluge of thick glowing sludge that poured out into Viper's chest cavity. Aliana retched and reeled back, stumbling away from the autopsy table to suck in a few gasps of air and calm her dry heaving. By the gods, this was horrific! Viper had quite literally suffocated on the ooze filling her lungs while the mushrooms decayed her organs from within! It took a good long while for Aliana to settle back down, but when she did, she began to count down from 20 in her head, psyching herself back up to return to her task. By all that is holy and evil, what is this sickness...?! The traumatized thought passed her mind, and then the ash and snow fae turned to go back to the table. In all honesty, she wanted to know how this had happened, and what had caused Viper to snap and turn on her own child. "It... It looks like the mushroom spores caused growths on her lungs. They prevented her from breathing right and getting enough oxygen. I... I think... the mushrooms were filling her lungs with this fluid too. She... She drowned in her own lungs." Gods, just that mental image was horrifying. But they still had a little more work to do still.

"Aliana"

Dalila gave a little nod of understanding when Aliana told her that she wanted to company to hopefully make the procedure feel less morbid. At Ali's insistence she pulled on a mask like the one Aliana was also wearing and settled back on her haunches to watch and at least keep Ali from having to go through this on her own. Her ears flicked back as she looked at Viper, her stomach twisting at the sight of her. Even though she had never really gotten along with Viper and they had never really reconciled after the misunderstanding that had caused the other woman to attack her she still would never have wished this fate her. From what she had seen of the sicknesses that had been plaguing Viper and the children of the island it was a rough fate to endure and she felt awful that Viper had to go this way.

Even from where she was sitting she could smell the odd twinge to the scent that was coming from Viper and once Aliana pulled back the first piece of skin to reveal what was hidden underneath she understood. Her stomach churned and she had to look away to let it settle for a moment before she could look again. It was the single most awful sight she had experienced and she had seen wolves in all manner of injury and decay. It felt incredibly unnatural what the illness and the mushrooms that had grown within Viper had done and it was extremely difficult to look at. When the lung was punctured and the spores flew out from the organ she was incredibly glad that Aliana had thought to use these masks. She couldn't look at Viper for long, only able to steal small glances before her stomach threatened to turn on her again. Aliana wasn't fairing much better, but the was honestly just impressed that she was able to examine the evidence well enough to discern as much as she did. "Just be careful," she warned before Ali began her work again. "With all those mushrooms and spores still present in there... I just don't want you getting sick too."

"Dalila"

Dalila's words of caution were caught my alert snowy ears, Aliana giving her companion a small nod of her head to acknowledge that she'd heard her. She agreed; there was no telling how contagious the mushrooms inside Viper's corpse were, and she didn't aim to find out. One death was enough. But she had to know more about the illness so they could treat the children. The newly crowned queen refused to let any of the puppies perish like this. Withdrawing from Viper's open chest cavity, Ali turned her darkened eyes to Viper's head. Just before she'd perished, Viper had shown bouts of unrestrained aggression and hostility towards everyone, even her own lover and child. Viper had been an unhinged maniac, sure, but she'd always been under control. When she'd died, Chimera had described her as "feral". That didn't sound like the Viper Ali knew. Had the mushrooms affected her mind as well?

Moving up to Viper's head, Aliana once again used the scalpel to make an incision that ran the entire circumference of Viper's crown, cutting through flesh and fur. When the cut was made, she set the scalpel down and instead picked up a wedged chisel. She placed the blade of the chisel in the incision until she felt metal hit bone, then looked to Viper's frozen, expressionless face with a twinge of sorrow. "I'm so sorry for this, Viper." Drawing her paw back, Ali hit the end of the chisel as hard as she could. The sound of fracturing bone snapped through the otherwise quiet study. Ali's stomach churned once again. Slowly, the clouded fae made her way around Viper's skull, using the bone to separate the top of her head from the rest of her skull. Once she felt Viper's scalp come loose, she set the chisel aside and looked back to Dalila. "Chimera said that Viper hadn't been acting herself in her last few days. She'd gotten violent and more openly aggressive, even with him," she explained, as if perhaps to justify why she was doing what she was doing. "I just... I have to know..."

Resting delicate paws on either side of Viper's segmented skull, Aliana gingerly lifted the top of her cranium away—and promptly dropped it to the table with a squeak of horror. Inside her skull, Viper's brain was completely covered in mushrooms, just like her lungs had been. They grew all across the ridges and ripples of the decease wolf's gray matter, filling up her skull like a grotesque and macabre terrarium. But most horrifically, large parts of her brain where the mushrooms grew the largest were already black and necrotic, with some portions dissolving or sinking into itself. The mushrooms had been eating her brain alive, not only killing her over time, but gradually whittling away her personality, her control, herself. The sight was horrendous and disgusting. Aliana had never felt so much sympathy for a wolf before. Like her or not, Viper didn't deserve to die the way she had.

Aliana was quick to back away from the autopsy table, looking to Dalila with wide, panicked eyes. If this was what an advanced case could do to a fully grown wolf with a healthy immune system, she didn't want to think about the danger the children were in. They had to find a way to cure them! "We have to burn the body," she said to Dalila, the tremor in her voice betraying her worry. "We can't risk something else feeding on the remains and spreading this disease. We have to burn it." There could be no argument against it. Viper's body was host to a colony of parasitic and infectious mushrooms. They had to be eradicated at the source if they were to protect Fenmyre from further infection.

"Aliana"

Dalila continued to observe Aliana at work, watching how she handled the scalpel, noticing which parts of Viper she had chosen to investigate. As morbid and awful as it was, it was more of a wolf's internal anatomy than she had seen since she began to take an interest in healing. It was also the first and hopefully only time she had seen a body effected like Viper's was. As Ali moved around to Viper's head, Dalila stepped a bit closer, managing to examine the chest cavity a bit more now that Aliana had stepped aside. It made a pit in her stomach to think that the children were suffering with this illness as well. She didn't want to believe that any of them were as bad as Viper had gotten, but what if they did? It was bad enough losing Viper—she wasn't sure that they could bear losing one of the children.

Dalila had been too caught up in looking at the horror that was Viper's lungs to notice what Aliana was doing at first, not at least until she heard the Queen apologize to Viper, which brought Dalila's gaze curiously up to see what was going on. She spotted the chisel that had ben placed at Viper's skull a moment before Ali hit it into the bone, the sound making her flinch and her ears flick back. She paced around the table to where Aliana was working, trying her best to focus on learning opportunity of it all rather than how grotesque it was. Once Ali was done and began to explain how Viper had acted before her death. She nodded in understanding, but at this point Ali really didn't have to explain herself. She had no doubt that the other healer had a reason behind what she was doing even if Dalila didn't immediately know why.

The squeak that left Ali startled her and she jumped back to her feet to come to Ali's side to see what it was... only to see that what Ali was uncovering during her autopsy was even worse than she could have imagined. She looked into Viper's skull with widened, horrified eyes at what she saw had become of Viper's brain and she was only able to look at it for a moment before she had to walk away, moving back around to the other side of the table to keep herself from getting sick. She didn't look back up at Ali again until she spoke about needing to burn the body to prevent it possibly spreading further from something feeding on this. Dalila gave a somber nod, giving Viper another look before she began moving toward the door. "I'll go start preparing a place to build the fire. We should probably get it done sooner rather than later."

"Dalila Vista Rocha"